CAR UNTRACED

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 10

CAR UNTRACED

INQUEST ON CYCLIST

OPEN VERDICT RETURNED

When the inquest was resumed this morning on Charles Bell, aged 19, the police had no further information regarding the motor-car which ran him down on tho Hutt road near the Hutt Valley Power Board's premises on the night of 2Sth November last. One witness, Owen Herbert Cross, a telegraphist, who heard the crash, was called, but he said ho did not notice the number of the car which ran into Bell. Tho Coroner (Mr. E. Page, S.M.) returned an open verdict that the deceased was killed while cycling along the Hutt road by being run down by an overtaking motor-car, driven by some person unknown.

Cross said the car was low-set, and' appeared to be a thrce-seater roadster. He could not see who was in the car.

Mr. W. E. Leicester said there was no evidence tho relatives could call. They appreciated the endeavours that had been mad- by the police, but they hoped that after the inquest tho matter would not be dropped.

la reviewing the evidence, the Coroner said that the night was one of poor visibility. Eain commenced to fall, which had the effect of darkening the bitumen, and at the time of the accident the street lamps happened 'to have failed. The cyclist had no tail light or reflector, but his passenger had an electric torch. The motor-car was on its correct side of the road, and its speed did not appear to havo been excessive.- Under all the circumstances tho presence of a cyclist would have been difficult to observe, and the fatality might have happened without any. negligence on tho part of the driver of the motor-car. The unsatisfactory phase of tho case, however, was that the driver of the ear, a woman, after running down the cyclist), drove on and escaped without disclosing her identity. Mr. Grey, engineer to the Power Board, gave a car number to the police, but this proved to belong to a lorry which had not been out on the evenL.g of the fatality, and it was clear that a mistake had been made in the number. The utmost efforts of the police had failed to trace the motor-car' which ran into Bell.